This document discusses using low-cost and open-source approaches for effective UAV surveys of landscapes and cultural heritage. It notes that UAV technologies are becoming cheaper, allowing more widespread application. Less sophisticated systems can yield significant data for scientific and practical purposes. Combining low-cost and open-source approaches provides modularity, portability, interoperability and adaptability for UAV surveys while achieving good results. The document presents examples from the author's work using these methods for landscape observation, building investigation, archaeology surveys, and post-earthquake assessment.

1. MERGING LOW-COST AND OPEN-SOURCE APPROACHES AS A STRATEGY
FOR EFFECTIVE UAV-BASED SURVEY OF LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL
HERITAGE.
Gianluca Casagrande – GREAL – Università Europea di Roma (gianluca.casagrande@greal.eu)
Flavia Salvatori – ITAB CNR
UAV technologies are developing and spreading quickly on the general market; currently available hardware
and software are becoming cheaper and this makes the application potential of these powerful tools grow. An
increasing number of scientific and technical operators is using small unmanned aerial vehicles as means to
acquire information about the material nature and status of environmental and cultural heritage assets.
Technologies are quickly adjusting to different needs and operational profiles, so that in some cases the
challenge moves from that of owning a micro-drone to that of choosing the most appropriate configuration to fit
the operators’ needs. If cutting-edge systems and sensors are required in several high-profile applications,
experience is showing that in many other cases less sophisticated systems yield plenty of data and allow deep
and full-blown knowledge acquisition. Such knowledge can then be used for scientific purposes and to plan
practical actions as well. At the same time, the ease in acquisition and operation of "modest" technologies
allows to broaden the scope of research activities, to involve a wider number of workgroups and to both study
and protect a larger number of culturally and historically relevant buildings and landscapes. In order to achieve
these results, appropriate strategies should be adopted in designing systems configurations and in planning
operations. Such strategies include modularity, portability, interoperability and adaptive-substitutability of
implementations. It turns out that all of these expected features can be obtained by effectively merging low-cost
with open source approaches. Several applications of this concepts were tested by Università Europea di Roma’s
Geographic Research and Application Laboratory (GREAL) between 2010 and 2012. Examples will be
presented from our own experience and work: qualitative observations of lanscape and settlement conditions;
investigation of material status of historically relevant buildings; aerial archaeology prospections and
photogrammetry tests, postearthquake survey of damaged cultural heritage buildings.